Scientia Prof Christine Alexander
- Phone: +61 2 9385 2310
- Email: c.alexander@unsw.edu.au
- Building: Robert Webster
- Room No: 203
Scientia Professor
MA Canterbury; Ph.D. Cambridge; FAHA
Research Summary
Professor Christine Alexander is an eminent nineteenth-century scholar, with special expertise in Romanticism and Victorian literature, textual transmission and critical editing, children’s writing, and the major authors Jane Austen and Charlotte
Brontë.
Research Interests:
The Brontës; Jane Austen; literary juvenilia and the child writer; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature; the relationship between literature and landscape; bibliography and critical editing.
Research and Teaching Initiative
Professor Alexander is Director and General Editor of the Juvenilia Press, a highly successful international research and pedagogic enterprise, hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW. The Juvenilia Press encourages literary and
historical research of youthful writings and teaches the professional skills of critical and textual editing to graduate students.
http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/juvenilia/
Teaching
Professor Alexander has taught at all levels, both in Australia and overseas, chiefly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and in women’s studies. She is currently working on the Brontës and the visual arts; Jane Austen and landscape; and on an ARC-funded project on literary juvenilia and the child writer. She welcomes research students in these or related fields.
Publications
Professor Alexander's discovery and critical editing of over 100 unpublished manuscripts and a similar number of visual art works pioneered research in two major areas of Brontë studies. Her groundbreaking study of The Early Writings of
Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) won the prestigious British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; her major 3-volume scholarly Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 1991) opened
new horizons in Brontë Studies; her co-authored The Art of the Brontës (CUP, 1995) was the first visual arts book in the field; and she has co-authored the definitive reference work on the Brontës and their cultural context: The Oxford
Companion to the Brontës (OUP, 2001, paperback 2006).
Professor Alexander is also internationally recognized as a pioneer in developing and defining the new genre of literary juvenilia, now being adopted for study in a number of universities in Canada, the USA and Japan. Her recent book The Child
Writer from Austen to Woolf (CUP, 2005), co-edited with Juliet McMaster, is the first work in this new area in English Literature. Her other research interests and publications range across fiction and history, landscape design, art-history,
women's studies, and child development in writing and education.
Professor Alexander's work has been translated into Japanese, German and Italian; she has given distinguished lectures at Harvard, Melbourne, Princeton, Naples, and Tokyo; she has been awarded a number of ARC and other grants; she has held Visiting
Fellowships at Pembroke College and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and at Duke University; she was a Fellow of the Institute of the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and held a competitive Library Fellowship at Princeton
University. She was recently the inaugural recipient of the Malcolm Bowie Distinguished Visiting Scholarship at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Affiliations and Memberships
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities; ARC Senior Research Fellow (1993-8)
Other Information
ARC Senior Research Fellow (1993-8)
Awarded a Commonwealth of Australia Centenary Medal for Service to Australian Society and the Humanities in the Study of English Literature.
Appointed a Scientia Professor in 2007
